In politically unstable Bangladesh, rickshaw riders can recite poetry by the
yard. Keith Miller listens as writers debate the effects of empire at the
Hay Festival in Dhaka

The third morning of the Hay Festival Dhaka saw a tireless Rosie Boycott mount the podium once more to moderate an energetic panel of four young graphic novelists, Carrie Fransman and S J Harris from Britain, Sarnath Banerjee and Samit Basu from India. They talked about the many possibilities of the medium and their different strategies within it; about its ready applicability to digital culture, its distinct creative opportunities.

Asked by Boycott to account for the relatively recent acceptance of graphic novels and “grown-up” comics as a serious art form in Britain, Banerjee politely pointed out that the form had been taken seriously enough for some time now in plenty of other countries – and that Britain had a certain amount of previous in the text-plus-image field itself, having produced “the three Williams” – Hogarth, Blake and Morris. Closer to home, the tradition of Bengali narrative scrolls was an influence and an exemplar. Fransman said that having access to both words and images made it possible to address difficult subject matter. Something of a pioneer in the field of graphic journalism, she also cited “graphic medicine”, a newish practice whereby picture-making is deployed as a diagnostic tool.

The four artists, or writers, or whatever they are (Basu said with a kind of quiet pride that he couldn’t draw, but that the rewards of working collaboratively tended to outweigh the slightly manic sense of perfectionism that might overcome you if you were responsible for every aspect of a piece of work yourself), are involved with the British Councilon a wider project, showing their work alongside Bangla artists/writers at the very groovily-titled Bengal Art Lounge in Dacca, and conducting workshops in rural Bangladesh. The Council generally is a quietly crucial presence at the Festival, supporting authors, supplying backup to Hay's Dhaka production team, smoothing feathers here and there. It is, with apologies to Private Eye, an International Treasure.

After lunch (some excellent tandoori fish and black dal – you’ve got to keep your strength up) I went to an event on translating from Bangla to English. I expected this to be a bit clubby and technical, and I suppose it was. But it was also further evidence of the passionate literary culture of this country (not least in some vigorous questioning directed at the panellists afterwards). I’d got talking to a “Brummie Bengali” doctor on Friday, in Dhaka for a family visit, fielding marriage proposals, reconnecting with his roots. He told me that Bangla has as many words for “love” as the Inuit proverbially have for “snow”; at the event, I learnt it also has a word for “the balance betweeen heart and mind”. I was a little surprised at the panellists’ insistence that it was more important for a translator to have absolute fluency in the “source” language than the “target” language – that’s not what Nabokov thought – but struck by how personal the panellists’ motivations for taking on this or that commision tended to be: working with living authors, several of them friends, generates a special intimacy, and requires special diplomatic skills.

Next, the Indian essayist and critic Pankaj Mishra spoke of the pleasures of idle youth, living cheaply in a village outside Delhi as a student and young reviewer, reading a lot, swanning about like the protagonist of a nineteenth-century Russian novel (these, he said, were widely and cheaply available in India when he was growing up courtesy of the Soviet Union, which also freighted in less cherishable tomes such as the Collected Speeches of Leonid Brezhnev). He spoke – a little grandly – about various Asian nations, the subjects of a series of long articles he has written for the London Review of Books, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, now corralled into a book. Japan was “facing up to a future as a post-growth economy”; China not at all a police state in the straightforward sense of the term – tell that to Ai Weiwei, I thought – but a unique hybrid, by no means a model for emulation but not worth having nighmares about. China must look different if you’re close to it, of course (Dhaka is about as far from Chengdu as from Delhi).

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Then, to the sound of eyebrows raising across the hall, he was told by an audience member that he “wrote as a Westerner” – meaning that he spends part of his time living in the West, and writes in English for Western papers. This seemed to be taking identity politics a bit far – substitute England for the West and Wales for India, and you had a scene from a Kingsley Amis novel.

Mishra had a hugely enjoyable spat with Niall Ferguson in the letters page of the LRB a year or so ago, after criticising the latter’s celebratory take on the British Empire. I had half expected that to come up; but of course nobody here knew or much cared who Niall Ferguson was.

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Now it is Sunday morning; I’m sitting in the departure lounge at Abu Dhabi airport, undergoing heavy levels of air-conditioning. In front of me is the impressive new control tower, curved and tapered like a scimitar – or, one might unkindly suggest, a giant half-buried banana, relic of a long vanished fruit-worshipping desert cult. The city is just visible beyond, milky and indistinct in the heat. It’s too dry for mosquitos, but a solitary dragonfly is zipping about beyond the window, as if on guard.

The night flight from Dhaka was full of Bangladeshi migrant workers, bound for Doha, for Bahrain, for Dubai. The men work in construction, a few in retail; the women are cleaners and nannies. Conditions are notoriously tough; yet thousands of Bangladeshis choose this over farming or factory work back home. The garment industry that employed so many is flatlining. Exports to the West were hit by the recession; and there there are justifiable concerns over worker safety. The country is clearly not working: massively unequal, politically unstable (I walked past a peacable, not to say jolly, demonstration by the ruling Awami party yesterday, but there have been a series of damaging strikes, attended by outbreaks of violence). It seems trite to offset this against some happy-clappy proclamation of the indomitability of the human spirit, though many times in the past two days I’ve seen profoundly affecting displays of grace, and cheerfulness, under pressure; and it’s unclear how, with literacy levels in Bangladesh still pretty low (though they are rising faster than elsewhere in the developing world), the urbane literary culture on display at Hay Dhaka fits in with the compromised reality that surrounds it.

Yet for all the events I attended the audience was more diverse than it would have been for comparable events in Britain – mostly educated, about half aged 50-plus, to be sure; but also many younger people including several students, a few of these from rural backgrounds, with very patchy formal education. My Brummie Bengali friend reckoned the rickshaw riders can quote Bangla poetry by the yard – try getting a few lines of Yeats out of a London cabbie. People in their late teens and early twenties stopped me in the compound to talk about books they were reading – and to ask, a little impertinently, if I was one of the Bee Gees. The cultural engagement is real, and widespread.